Edwin Black speaks on new findings of Nazi-links to North Carolina racist eugenics

The United States, with help from wealthy individuals and foundations, launched upon a campaign of racial extermination that inspired the Nazis. Black offers shocking new evidence in the new edition of War Against the Weak.

Investigative journalist and author Edwin Black will launch the new expanded edition of his award-winning bestseller War Against the Weak during a live global event in the North Carolina General Assembly’s Legislative Auditorium in Raleigh, NC, at noon on April 25. The book has a special appendix on North Carolina’s program. During the launch event, Black will present his new findings on North Carolina’s program of eugenic genocide against its own citizens, which, he states, was executed in lockstep with national and Nazi eugenic leaders throughout America and in the Third Reich. After his presentation, Black will answer questions live from both audience members and remote participants worldwide. Advance requests have already come in from concentration camp scholars in Poland, genetic study groups in San Francisco, and from survivors of the North Carolina program.

NC State Rep. EarlineParmon of Winston-Salem will introduce the program and Black's presentation. Rep. Parmon, along with Rep. Larry Womble, has championed the cause of compensation for the state's surviving eugenic victims. More than 27 states joined the shameful decades-long utopian campaign of medically and legislatively engineered racial supremacy. But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay—and who should write the check—is now the subject of a historically wrenching debate. Many suggest the legislature will vote $50,000 for each surviving victim.

The new appendix to War Against the Weak reveals that North Carolina eugenic officials in the 1930s and 1940s were less concerned about the state’s population than doing its bit to advance the worldwide campaign to create a Master Race. Raceologists at the apex of American eugenics were working with North Carolina officials. These include Harry Laughlin of the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenics Record Office. In 1938, Laughlin had set into motion Connecticut governor Wilbur Cross’s plan to declare thousands of Connecticut’s residents “unfit aliens,” and “deport” them to their “ancestral states,”including North Carolina.

Under the state plan, never executed, Connecticut citizens would be stripped of their assets before deportation. It was presumed these “displaced” Americans would be so numerous and without funds, that they would be housed in receiver state confinement camps where they would be mass sterilized. Euthanasia, long a cause celebre of eugenicists, was also explored if a way could be found to make it legal. Laughlin’s plan was aborted when Governor Cross failed in his 1938 re-election bid. Nazi eugenics collapsed when the Third Reich fell in 1945.

After World War II, when eugenics was declared genocide under international law, most American states vanquished their sterilization programs. North Carolina did not. It accelerated sterilizations under the leadership of race scientists and eugenicists from leading North Carolina universities, as well as the state’s legal and medical establishment. Some 8,000 North Carolinians were forcibly sterilized.

By way of background, say Black, eugenics was a fraudulent social theory claiming that a better society could be created by eliminating “undesirable” human blood lines, while promoting the “desirable” types. “This dark crusade was waged in the first decades of the twentieth century by progressives, liberal do-gooders, and social engineers who sought to forcibly manufacture a utopia,” he says, adding, “In Greek, the word utopia means ’nowhere.’”

Race science and eugenics sprang to life in the socio-economically convulsive years of the twentieth century, during which Asians, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, Blacks, and other ethnic groups and racial mixtures inundated U.S. cities, creating overcrowding and class conflict. The intellectual, academic, scientific, and financial elite—many of them wealthy ranchers and livestock breeders—believed better men and women could be cultivated using the same techniques a farmer would employ to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat: eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good. They planned to eliminate all those who did not resemble themselves, 10 percent at a time—that is, as many as 14 million people at a slice. Their eventual goal was to subtract as much as 90 percent of the population from the reproductive future of the United States. Eventually, they hoped no one would exist other than those who resembled themselves.

Black states, “As hard as it may be for post-WWII society to believe, the preferred methods of the eugenics movement were gas chambers and other forms of euthanasia. The first public euthanasia legislation was introduced into the Ohio legislature in 1908. Such measures were unsuccessful. The next best thing was forced surgical sterilization under specific state authority. This policy in many states was validated as the law of the land in the U.S. Supreme Court by one of America’s most stellar jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1927, Holmes ruled on an obviously collusive lawsuit seeking to justify the forced sterilization of a poor, white, and seemingly uneducated Appalachian named Carrie Buck, as well as her mother, and her average, healthy daughter. Local society undoubtedly denigrated them with the epithet ‘poor white trash.’ Carrie Buck’s lawyers and the state attorneys were openly in cahoots, manipulating the legal system to uphold the values of racial supremacy—and sterilize and entire bloodline. They succeeded.”

War Against the Weak is the winner of four prestigious awards: The “Best Humanitarian Book of the Year” from the World Affairs Council-Great Lakes awarded during the year of initial publication; the 2010 “Justice for All Award” conferred in a Congressional ceremony by the American Association of People with Disabilities; and last year, the book was honored by the Initiative for Moral Courage, and as a “Drum Major for Justice” by North Carolina Central University. Last December, Black was called to testify before Congress about the history of eugenics and eugenicide.

“North Carolina’s war against its own citizens was nothing short of genocide,” said Black. “The state should compensate. But the guilt must be shared with the philanthropic organizations and academic groups that pushed the state to do the unthinkable and tried to rationalize it as sound science—when it was all a racist scientific fraud.”

Black’s appearance is broadly sponsored by the Campbell Law School in association with the Urban League of Winston-Salem, North Carolina Holocaust Council, the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Jewish Life at Duke, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the State of California Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance, The Auto Channel, History Network News, The Cutting Edge News, Spero Forum, and the Jewish Virtual Library.

A sweeping coalition of public persons and more than a dozen leading universities and academic groups came together last fall to cosponsor Black’s multi-campus tour in which he illuminated the organic connections between North Carolina’s program and Nazi eugenics.

The list included Winston-Salem State University, encompassing its School of Health Sciences, School of Business and Economics, School of Education, and Human Performance and College of Arts and Sciences North Carolina Holocaust Council, in association with Jewish Life at Duke University, Duke Center for Multicultural Affairs, North Carolina Central University, Appalachian State University Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the Charlotte and Dick Levin Jewish Community Center-Durham, Guilford College.

The 2011 tour was cosponsored by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the State of California Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance, the Binghamton Social Justice Fund, and History Network News, the Institute for Religion and Public Policy, Jewish Virtual Library, The Auto Channel, and Spero Forum.

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling and international investigative journalist, historian, and author of 80 award-winning editions in 14 languages in 65 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel. With more than a million books in print, his work focuses on genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropic abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. Black is best known for the award-winning book IBM and the Holocaust.